The Long Night

From my blog Near Earth Object.

Readers of my blog may already be aware of my deep affection for the thousand-plus-page tome The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, journalist William Shirer's invaluable 1960 history of Hitler and his Germany. It was with great delight, then, that I was made aware of a history of that history, Steve Wick's The Long Night, telling the story of Shirer's years covering the tumult in Europe, mostly from the eye of the storm itself, Berlin.

Though I feel it is missing a crucial chapter, it is a stirring tale. As Wick himself notes, it reads as much more of an adventure tale than a formal history or biography. Shirer struggles daily for over a decade with Nazi censorship, separation from his wife and child, a lack of support from his employers back home, his deep disappointment with the German people, and his own hubris and failings.

We learn a great deal about the mindset of the period, as Shirer was a tuned-in, worldly journalist who had come from extremely humble, rural beginnings. Of particular note to some of this blog's readers is Shirer's impression of the Scopes “Monkey Trial,” the event in American history that in many ways began the culture wars in which we struggle today:

As Shirer saw it, the drama unfolding in Tennessee in anticipation of the upcoming trial was reason alone to take leave of his country. “I yearned for some place, if only for a few weeks, that was more civilized, where a man could drink a glass of wine or a stein of beer without breaking the law, where you could believe and say what you wanted to about religion or anything else without being put upon, where inanity had not become a way of life, and where a writer or an artist or a philosopher, or merely a dreamer, was considered just as good as, if not better than, the bustling businessman.”

Even then, the willfully ignorant mob was making the rest of civilization feel unwelcome, just as the Tea Party imbeciles do today. Indeed, even Shirer's struggles with a supposed journalistic need for “balance” over a human being's honest impression rings true today. And like today, honesty did not always win the day over bland neutrality:

As for Hitler's speech proposing peace for Europe, Shirer knew it was a lie. He was disgusted with himself for not declaring it so flat out. But he knew he could not, nor could he find a German outside the government to say it, and the frustration ate at him. “The proposal is a pure fraud, and if I had any guts, or American journalism had any, I would have said so in my dispatch tonight,” he wrote. “But I am not supposed to be ‘editorial.' ”

But as a fan of Shirer's definitive work, I concluded my reading with a slight sting of disappointment. Wick omits from his tale the writing of Rise and Fall; the process of putting this all-important book together is almost totally absent. Wick himself tells us near the book's end that to do so would mean a wholly separate volume. “A biographer will someday write the story of the enormous hurdles Shirer had to climb to sell the book,” demurs Wick, and one can't help but wish that this hypothetical book already existed within the one we were already reading.

What a herculean effort it must have been to pen such a book! Ten years of Shirer's life was poured into it, and its influence will be felt for generations. Surely, this story can be told as well as the formative experiences in Europe that led to the book's genesis. It is not Wick's fault that this is missing (though having the words “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” in the subtitle does lead one on), but its absence is palpable and deflating.

That said, the book as it is holds up, and it is a story that needed to be told. We learn so much about what it means to be a journalist, a pro-democracy American, a liberal, and a vulnerable human being caught in a volatile, insane world.